[Libreoffice-qa] How to change QA processes: was: What should we do with bugs filed against Extensions/Templates?

[Petr Mladek]

On Fri, 2013-04-05 at 18:04 +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
> I am personally not completely happy with the proposed solution but I
> will explain this in another mail. I would like to keep this one focused
> on the way how we change and define QA processes.

I think that Rainer's solution described at
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA-FAQ#How_to_handle_bugs_for_LibreOffice_Component_Extension is correct and it is the only way what we could do now.

My concerns is that it is not trivial, there is the man in the middle
and still some risky states:

   + it is not easy to find the author
   + it is not easy to find if the author did not answered or if the bug
     triagger just did not update the bug
   + I am not sure what to do with the bug if the author accepts it but
     does not subscribe to bugzilla and does not upload the fixed
     extensions immediately. This bug could stay there forever or
     could get closed without being fixed.

I think that we could do better by the ideas mentioned earlier in this
thread. I tried to summarize them in two enhancement requests (one is
actually Rainer's):


+ https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58423
  Activate Issue tracker URL

  This enhancement would solve two problems:
	+ mark extensions supported by bugzilla FDO (TDF)
        + use the right bug tracker when available


+ https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63299
  allow to enter feedback to the extensions; public or only for authors

  This would allow to handle bugs in extensions that are not supported
  by TDF without the man in the middle. We could ask people to contact
  the author and simply close the bugs in bugzilla.


I think that this would be more effective and clear.

I hope that it solves all concerns mentioned in this thread except for
the banners about support level. Well, I am not sure if it is a good
idea from the marketing point of view:

     + users will be scared to install extensions without support but
       these might simply work
     + frank developers might have troubles to promise good support but
       the extensions might simply work; these developers would be
       afraid to develop extensions for LO
     + some other developer might promise the support but they need not
       have time to provide it; so, the flag would be misleading; I am
       not sure how to judge this

By other words, I think that the flag could do more harm than good :-)


I hope that we could close this thread now and continue the discussion
in the enhancement bugs. Heh, the exception might be the banner.

Also feel free to open even more enhancement bugs in this are. There is
also the meta bug https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63297 :-)


Best Regards,
Petr